They'll turn out like pickled jalapenos. You can get a jar at any food store for about a buck and see if you like them. Great served over nachos or anything else where you want jalapeno flavor with a bit less spice.

You could also ferment them and turn either into a hot sauce. Check /r/fermentation for pepper mash and work from there. It will keep (purely fermented) for 6 months to a year, or boiled afterwards and stored with vinegar for a few months.

They will. Usually takes about 24 hours for start of primary fermentation, it may take a little longer with spicy peppers. It'll start rocking and rolling around day 3, and then ferment will mostly subside around day 7. The peppers will also rise to the top of the liquid in next day or two.

You'll know it's fermenting either when the hats in the airlocks rise, or C02 starts getting trapped under the peppers. The J's and B's may need to be pressed depending on how much expansion is caused by CO2 buildup.

Looks good. If they wind up being too hot, you can boil the mash in the brine until the brine mostly evaporates and it'll tame the heat a bit but it will kill the lacto bacteria and significantly increase its rate of spoilage.

Edit* OH SHIT. Vinegar in before fermenting? That shit might not start fermenting. I know a little bit can be used, but that's a ton of fucking vinegar called for before primary fermentation. Always add vinegar after fermentation.

Or not. As long as the chicken is white throughout you're okay. I've done the full 8 hours on low and had good results if covered in a tasty liquid, but it gets done much much quicker than that and if you can verify it then you might wind up with juicier chicken. I used to do 7-8 lbs of chicken by themselves with a bit of liquid and wind up with dry and terrible chicken so I thought I'd mention that this is how I've overcome this... it's still totally possible to get really fall apart chicken on longer cook times, but I'm happy to get it just done and then deal with it after that.

Depending on the size, check out the serious eats no knead cast iron pizza. I'll make mine with the same technique with an 1.5-2 hour initial rise and cook for a short time until the dough is just crusty on the outside, with a bit of broiling to brown everything up while keeping the interior of the dough quite chewy. http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/01/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe.html

Super suggestion: some kind of parmesean shaker type cheese on the crust before going into the oven will brown up and be unbelievably awesome.

I thought that using a roller crushes the potential rise for pizza dough (hence stretching techniques). I could imagine for a thinner crust this would be good, but am I totally wrong that a roller inhibits the kind of rising needed for a medium to deep dish consistency?

My thoughts are, it only takes about 3-3&1/2 hours on low to fully cook most decently sized chicken breasts with the two models of slow cookers I've used. Recently did a fajita-ish slow cooker recipe with the chicken totally above the liquid that formed during cooking and got around 185 to 190 degrees while doing so.

The chunks would likely decrease total cooking time, which may be better or worse depending on whether you are using fresh onions or other veggies that need a bit longer to release the liquid from themselves.

A good meat thermometer (not in terms of price, but reliability, can help you figure out the amount of time you need to fully cook chicken as I've found that overcooking can leave it dry even when fully submerged in a tasty liquid).

Why so? It's easy to do, it's hard to screw up, and if things go wrong (mold or other problems) one's eyes and nose are biologically inclined to tell you it's gone bad.

I wouldn't suggest any fermentation that needs constant temperature control like yogurt, or special innoculation like soy sauce or whatever, but sticking veggies in a jar with salt water is simple and can be delicious.

Unless, you mean that the sour flavors of fermentation may be to wide for his palette, then you may have something... but I think that even short fermentations can produce a lot of flavor without bringing on a flavor that many Americans don't really find appealing at first taste.

I'm taking this celery recipe from http://phickle.com/celery-radish-pickles/ where the blogger suggests celery and daikon (Japanese radish) which I really like. They have tons of other ideas and explain the process as well. Red radishes also ferment something awesome.

Edit* Use glass or food safe ceramic for fermenting. I'll do BPA free plastic for short term ferments. You'll rust any metal vessel you try this in and leach out nasty stuff from non-treated ceramics.

Basically. Cut celery to length of base to neck of mason jar. Put 2-3 cloves of garlic chopped roughly on the bottom; red pepper flakes for a tiny bit of spiciness. Either pack the celery in tight, or wedge a smaller stalk across the top of the other sticks. The idea is to keep everything under the brine so as to keep aerobic bacteria like mold away from their food (lactobacteria is anaerobic).

Cover with 5% brine (leave a bit of head space). Place lid on just shy of finger tight. The good lacto bacteria (think yogurt) will eat the bits of sugar in there (you can toss a bit of cut onion in on the bottom to get a bit more fermentation going since it's got more sugar than celery) and produce C02. IF you screwed the lid on tight it would either carbonate the brine or produce so much CO2 your jar would shatter. If left completely alone, the CO2 will settle on the surface of the water and provide extra protection against bad bacteria.

Primary fermentation will start about 24 hours after you submerge everything (depending on the temperature; colder = slower fermentation and warmer = faster fermentation) and last for 4-7 days or so. So long as everything is covered in brine, you could leave it on your counter for 6 months to a year. After a day or two on the counter, it will store for at least a year in the fridge. You can also do this with fresh made salsa; place lid on loosely fresh salsa, leave out on counter for 2 days. It will then keep in the fridge for about 6 months.

With such loose pack that celery makes, you won't have to do much other than wait. If you were to do sauerkraut (cabbage, salt, seasoning) you don't need brine but its so densely packed that you will either need to pack the jar a bit less than 3/4 full or press it every day to let the CO2 escape.

The celery will continue to get more sour as time goes on; if you wait too long and it gets too sour for your liking, just drain the brine, fill the jar with purified water, and stash in the fridge for about 24 hours and it'll go back to tasting like fresh celery--minus the bit of softening. This isn't a really fragrant ferment, but if you decide you like this process (or you get the sour bug something fierce) you can set up an airlock system to keep the smell at bay for a few bucks a jar.

I think it's total voodoo, but if you've ever seen the Jamie Lee Curtis yogurt commercials that talk about live culture bacteria, this is what you're doing with this process. The voodoo part in my opinion is that these bacteria are super great for intestinal and colon health (some people with stomach issues swear by fermentation), but it does break down some of the tougher bits (don't know how much it converts insoluable to soluable fiber in veggies) but it is softer and thus (reasonably rather than scientifically speaking) should be easier to digest.

You can keep a lot of root veggies at room temperature for months on end if you store in salt water (I use a 5% brine which is 1 TBSP salt to 2 cups filtered water) through the process of fermentation (think sauerkraut, kimchi, hot sauces, sour pickles, etc.). After 4 days or so softer veggies will start to get even softer (think texture difference between cucumber and a pickle on the inside).

It's cheap, easy, and you can even infuse veggies with other flavors if you want. Garlic + Celery makes crunchy celery that has a big kick of garlic; you can also make them spicy with some pepper flakes or hotter peppers.

Check out /r/fermentation if you're interested. Salt (preferably w/o iodine or anti-caching agents--sea salt for example), distilled water, and a mason jar are all you need to keep on hand besides spices/garlic.

His new theory starts when he introduces the Real of the body as the basic causality. We have to be even more specific: it is not so much the body he is referring to, no, he is talking about the organism and the organs. Indeed, in his lesson of the 27th of May 1964, Lacan surprises his audience by introducing them to another lack, another loss. This lack precedes the well-known lack in the chain of signifiers, the one that determines the desire of the subject in the dialectical exchange between mother and child. The least that can be said about this new lack is that it is indeed a very fundamental one, because it concerns the loss of the eternal life. Paradoxically enough, this lack is installed at the very moment of the conception, that is, at the moment of the birth of a sexually differentiated life form. In order to explain this unexplainable fact, Lacan provides his audience with a myth, that is, he tells them a story about something that flies away at the moment of birth, a kind of lamella. This thing lost forever is object (a) in its purest form as life instinct. For Lacan, the loss of eternal life goes back to a biological fact, and in this way, he will reconsider Freud’s biological rock. In opposition to Freud, he will interpret this biological fact not so much as a stumbling rock, but as something that permits the subject to escape from the all embracing determinism (of the Symbolic).

Break (direct responses)

Instead of a timeline, (from my limited knowledge, something I feel most of philosophy I know of is structured as.) it feels as a set of connected dots, with each dot connected to several others. In the end, I feel as if I haven't defined a single thing, which gives me the feeling I didn't understand anything at all. You'll see what I mean.

Mostly. There's a ton of stuff going on, all revolving around a few key ideas that Lacan takes from Freud and other philosophers and weaves into a more cohesive fashion. It's beyond me to actually point to anything like a key to the puzzle, and Lacan's later work (of which I'm wholly unfamiliar) emphasized the concepts and models of various kinds of knots. If I had to venture something like a story it would be thus:

First there is the child without language. We have no way of imagining what their world is like because we have language. Around the time of the mirror stage (the misrecognition of the image for the self) we are (as Kiarina Kordela has put it) suicided into language (the symbolic order) which gives rise to the imaginary, which protects us from the Real (that which cannot be symbolized) through fantasy. Once we have language, we use it to tell stories about ourselves and others which links to our identities. Of course, the unconscious is also around and it is, famously stated by Lacan, structured like a language (not a language itself). I sadly emphasize this with a forgetful mind insofar as I don't remember precisely what he means by this. I was looking for a more concise definition, and it seems like his manifesto (after being excommunicated from the broader psychoanalytic community) "THE FUNCTION AND FIELD OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS" might interest you though I've not read it myself.

Or, in other words, we escape from the real (that which can't be put into language; think trauma or moments wherein reality feels like it's been stripped away for a quick second that one literally can't explain), by means of entering language whereupon we create fantasy structures to keep absolute meaninglessness away. Thus, like I wrote a while back, we still have plenty of biological and unconscious things taking place around and within us, but Lacan and Zizek focus on the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about those things as well as ourselves and others.

It's one of the meanest "books" out there, but Lacan tries to cohere a lot of his work in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis wherein he discusses four concepts and how they relate to one another: unconscious, repetition, transference, and drive. Including Wikipedia there should be plenty of good resources for distilling the main points. But, since Lacan is literally working out his theory over his whole career (some say only to be undone by Deleuze and Guatarri's critique of psychoanalysis Anti-Oedipus) it's kind of hard to lay out the field in a quick way; rather, it's about weaving together a bunch of logically contradictory but structurally complimentary concepts and ideas.

But then on the other hand it boggles my mind that Zizek makes such movies seemingly intended for such a wide audience, and that these are superpopular! Am I this stupid?

Well, he was licensed (though never practiced) in Lacanian psychoanalysis, has an extensive background of all of the philosophers who influenced Lacan (including an immense knowledge of Marxism as a whole), has been studying it for the better part of his life, so not an idiot. It's really difficult stuff to get to the stuctural cohesion of it since it requires so much reading just regarding primary sources. The majority of his popular stuff is all really Marxist; here's how capitalism manipulates and utilizes our fantasies, now let me show you the structure of this manipulation with a bit of help from Lacan.

But I don't think it's too terribly difficult to pick up useful key concepts from the work, and that's Zizek's bag of tricks. Here's how, if we isolate X concept from Lacan (and combine it with Marx or Hegel or whoever), we can explain a very complex ideological example by showing how we have been trained to accept it as simple everyday commonsense.

For the time being, I've defined the 3 orders as 'states of being which are intertwined with eachother', a definition equally as vage, but at least gives me the feeling that I can wrap my head around it.

I think states of being might be too wonky, but I'll roll with how you work with it.

So where at first there were just a set of 'libinal needs' (= cravings?), there is now a sense of 'Me' (= Ideal-I? This got me confused for a while)(= reflection) and 'I' (= as you say the perciever, that which looks into the mirror)

Yeah, there is now also a sense of me which is always already also the source of our fundamental lack (where desire is going to come in later once the infant proceeds to learn how to come to terms with desire), and then puberty and etc. Not the ideal I--mostly just what Freud would call ego; I don't think Lacan strays too much from Freud with his use of the ideal-ego and ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is the person I want to be (fireman, my father/mother, an astronaut or whatever in early life, and then later the figures who we idolize or think we would like to be) in the realm of the imaginary and the ideal-ego is in the symbolic whereupon I look at myself from the position of the ego-ideal and judge myself (a kind of splitting up of Freud's interchangeable definition that was assigned to the superego); I've also heard the ideal-ego be described as a kind of trophy room whereupon we can dwell in a few things about ourselves or our previous actions that more closely resemble our ego-ideal (the rest is mostly disgust since we can't ever match up to our ego-ideal and thus we judge ourselves to be pathetic or weak or stupid or whatever; the superego is primarily our own private Don Rickles who sets impossible standards and then heckles us when we can't achieve them--very obscene.

Is this the sense of wholeness/complete satisfaction we've been talking about since the beginning? Is the Real the state of being in which a newborn doesn't experience lack, something we strive for for the rest of our life? Then why does Lacan stress the fact that this Real cannot be described in words?

Sort of and no. If we ascribe to the child/infant a wholeness we do so only because it's what we fantasize about; we project onto the child/infant (of which we can't understand anything about their experience even if we can predict/alter/train their behavior) multiple intense families. They have no lack, everything is provided for them, they have no responsibilities, they have someone who loves them unconditionally, they have someone who takes complete care of them (the main fantasy of 50 Shades of Grey--just to point out how intense this desire is since it is what allowed a horribly written piece of fiction become something like a national phenomenon--of course there's a shit ton of other factors involved, but can't pass up a chance to shit on the writing of the book). Etc.

The real is absolute horror. To experience the real is to experience the loss of language. It shatters our fantasies, it renders us non-human and ultimately vulnerable to the nothingness of ourselves and our place in the universe. It constantly threatens us; it's the 'thing' that allows inanimate objects like dolls to really feel like they are watching you; it's the sense of being watched by something you can't see; Lacan calls this the gaze (being seen from a position where no one could be); to re-emphasize, it's the absolute loss of self and recognition of the absolute indifference of the universe towards us (we, or I, or whatever imaginary fantasy of who I am and everything I tell myself about it become ABSOLUTELY meaningless); it's the stuff of trauma. The loss of language means the experience pass unfiltered (not written into narrative) into memory.

This is Freud's breakthrough in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; people with PTSD have a memory that literally can't be translated into words banging around in their brain trying to be assigned a narrative so that it can fit into the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. This is the concept of repetition.

So yeah. Think about the absolute blackness of space. Just a void of pure empty, meaningless, and indifferent fabric of reality that if you were to experience without a space suit would simply end you. The real is like that--Reality experienced without any filter. It's rare to experience and encounter with the Real, and thinkers like Alain Badiou and others have created novel ethical theories based on said encounters.

The Symbolic: a set of symbols, one of which is language (so basically culture) Right? But this isn't a state of being/intrapsychic realm then? I'm sure there's more to this.

Just a set of symbols. Or, think of a completely dead language; there should be meaning, but it just looks like structured gibberish. All meaning belongs to the realm of the imaginary, whereas culture designates which collection of absolutely arbitrary sounds, images, shapes, etc. have which meaning for the imaginary. This is really a continuation of Ferdinand De Saussure's work on semiotics. I may have linked this before, but this will help you a ton with thinking about Lacan's understanding and use of the concept of language and the symbolic. http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html Lacan was very clear that this was one of the most primary influences in his re-reading of Freud and beyond; I once heard an anecdote that Freud started with Neurotics (possessing language) while Lacan started with Pyschotics (without/damaged language).

Next there's the objet petit a, which functions as a symbol for lack ('lack' being the gap between Me and I ?). For a reason I don't fully understand, the 'I' tries to bridge the gap between I and Me. Is this so because the 'Me' appears to the 'I' as something complete the 'I' strives towards? Kinda like I think it does to the Real? Which ultimately brings me to your all the stuff we spoke about before about how desire works.

I think this is probably the biggest area of muddle (just to point out, not to judge).

The objet petit a is a symbol when we talk about analysis. It's not a symbol for the individual. The individual experiences a lack, and they fantasize about overcoming that lack. The objet petit a, or the imaginary thing that will completely fulfill the lack, is simply a name for what the individual really desires. I mistake my true desire (which isn't anything real or tangible) for an object that is tangible and obtainable.

Lack isn't necessarily the gap between me and I, that's just a useful example of the fractured nature that accompanies our acquisition of language. Nietzsche's probably the most concise about this in "On Truth and Lying in a non-moral sense" when he says that language is always already a lie because it employs concepts (roughly: words) that condense the infinite diversity of things in existence into particular schemas; REALLY BADLY PUT, the word leaf stands in for the Platonic form of Leaf insofar as it simply refers to "grows on branches" "transforms sunlight into energy via photosynthesis". The word leaf always fails to capture the difference between species, sizes, shapes, etc. of any existing leaf. It's the feeling that no matter how carefully you phrase yourself, no one can ever understand your exact and full meaning.

So, the general idea of the objet petit a points to why we have fantasies (we aren't whole). The Ego-ideal is the perfect example; once we become who we want to be there will be nothing left to do but be fundamentally and absolutely content or happy with every moment of every day. But there's always something missing.

Sorry I can't do much better on this since I see in your question more than I know how to answer (where and how lack comes from beyond simply the mirror stage). Short and curlies are the fact that language is always built on a non-existent platform. You could ask "why?" without ever arriving at a result, or you could ask for an infinite number of definitions to each word in the original and subsequent definition of any single word. This wikipedia article might actually do a much better job. I completely forgot about the lack of symbolic and real and have almost entirely been talking about imaginary lack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lack_(manque)

Why is this? Why is there an introduction of language once the child gets this sense of an I vs a Me?

Stop. Reverse that. The child uses something like language to make a concrete differentiation (albeit a misrecognition of sameness) between me and it so it requires something like language to separate what would otherwise be undifferentiated sameness. The idea of the stage is a loose metaphor, and it doesn't require a mirror and it may not happen in a single aha moment but it accompanies the child recognizing that it's a fixed point with control over itself. I'm not quite sure how to pin down the relationship here beyond the retroactive gesturing towards language being used to establish the separate from the self and maybe (pure speculation/extrapolation here) the disparity between words and meaning (that I can name something seems to give mastery or knowledge, but language can never be used to adequately describe or know myself).

My bad timing, but I was trying to link Lacan from what I got from de Saussure + how desire is linked with language. "Why coke and not water + sugar" as you said.

I think I misread/mispoke before, or was trying to be too much of a structuralist at that moment. Let's see if we can break it down. Coke is a signifier and a signified. I like to do signifiers and signifieds like a game of 20 questions. Coke is a great example. What are the mandatory minimum number of attributes that we can assign to the noun [coke] in question (what we're trying to guess by process of elimination). What gets super fascinating here is that there are so many ways of arriving at Coke since the connotations almost become inseparable from the sign. Brown liquid, sugary, carbonated gets us to most colas in the world and possibly some alcoholic beverages. Refreshing gets those who have been exposed to the cultural connotations of the beverage (produced/filtered through advertising) closer. Often stored in a red and white can mostly seals the deal.

Because of the interplay between signifiers and connotations, the sign does carry a ton of importance here since a blind taste test between Coca-Cola and knock-offs may actually demonstrate that the brand and all of the ideas attached to the sign of Coke affects how we experience, desire, or enjoy it.

Is this Lacan or Zizek building on Lacan?

I don't know much of Lacan actually writing about Marxism. Lacan was familiar with Hegel (through Kojeve) and Marx (who wasn't a Marxist in post-WWII France?) and so it's probably no surprise that Zizek insists that much of what Lacan wrote fits so well with Marx because the descriptions Marx gave of capitalism share overarching structural similiarties to the kind of desire produced in a capitalist society; Again, Deleuze and Guatarri are going to go so far as to say that Freud thought himself as belonging to hard science where he was always just a social scientist (doing little else than studying the effects of capitalism on the human body and brain rather than coming to any asocial or ahistorical conclusions about human beings).

Lacan writes of culture, and he is certainly aware of the structural similarities between Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche along with all of the others intertwined (his work on Kant and Sade is dope shit--deontological ethics as another name for the superego and Sade's fictions as logical end to Kan'ts moral system). Or, yeah, that's all Zizek in my book since Lacan is mostly focused on psychoanalysis as a practice and Zizek looking to it as a tool of analysis of culture rather than patients.

This confuses me. I thought the objet petit a is any object which subject might or might not mistake for that which will fill the bottomless pit? Isn't Coke an objet petit a then?

It's not an object. It's the thing that illuminates the object. You're looking at candy in a store, unable to decide what you want. All of a sudden you see it; exactly what you didn't even know you were craving. It's got a sexy glow to it that makes it look different that all the other candies around it. It sings the siren call. The glowing and the siren call is the objet petit (imaginary) while the actual candy object (material) is what we think actually possesses the glow and call. Fetish is a great example of this. There is nothing about a foot that is inherently sexy. All feet are feet (some more or less aesthetically appealing or dirty or whatever), but the foot fetishist derives a specific pleasure relating to (according to Freud) the trauma of the boy finding out that the mother has no penis; he fixes on an object and wills himself to believe that 'I know very well that her feet aren't her penis, but nonetheless I still believe it is.' This kernel of trauma allows the foot fetishist to assign importance or value to something that doesn't intrinsically possess it.

Or, put another way, the objet petit a is the overvaluation of something that doesn't possess it. Look at a $1 bill versus $100 bill. They are both just paper with numbers on it, but the $100 glows brighter in our eyes, it has more importance, etc. but the bill itself doesn't contain in its material existence any of the qualities that the $100 represents (not actually worth anything, can't be traded for goods, doesn't promise any fantasy of what you can buy, etc.).

That's probably the closest example. Objet petit a is a fantasy about an object and how it will fulfill some lack. I'm going to venture two lacks and their fulfillment, though don't quote me on the first since it's kind of a wild guess: a symbolic lack filled by buying a sports car after midlife crises mirroring castration anxiety, or imaginary lack fulfilled by a more tangible lack: my bike sucks but if I buy a $10,000 bicycle I won't ever have anything but fun and ease when biking. Again, mistaking the fantasy of what the object itself is capable of for the fantasy of simply being without lack.

Am I correct that Lacan/Zizek simply say that there is no life without desire? Is reaching Nirvana then a myth according to them?

100%. Only in catatonia or absolute brain death can there be life without desire (or at least what we would call someone endowed with some extended form of personhood); if we had no desire we would be pure drive and thus be zombies. Well, that's overstating it, but yeah no such thing as a subject without desire.

Nirvana would be considered a name for something else; I don't want to call it a myth (though it may very well be if we just mean a story that can't ever have happened to anyone at any time in history but functions socially as something that can be obtained/encountered) since myth is usually opposed to reason and its not unreasonable to posit or believe in Nirvana (it would be, following Kant, simply something we don't have the mental capacity to say anything about with any certainty).

I'd think of it as a concept that perpetuates the fantasy of everlasting life (refusal to accept death as what everyone must, by definition, experience) this comes up in Lacan's definition of the Lamella (See top of first post again).

For a comical interpretation of this problem (the recognition of death where previously there was only undying immortality) see the Futurama episode S06E06 "Lethal Inspection" where Bender has to come to terms with the fact that his backup unit, which promised infinite number of bodies, is broken.

If you're not going to watch it (or haven't seen it) (though it's really a fantastic piece of Television), see Fry's response to Bender's question "Dying sucks butt! How do you living beings cope with mortality?" here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMjxeZ9FRDE

I like Kant on this matter. Infinity and nothingness are both concepts that the human brain is wired to think towards, but neither are capable of being remotely cognizable. They fit within the antinomies that Kant writes about, and inifinity exists within the realm of the mathematical sublime; I can think of 10 apples, but when we get anywhere above a certain number (say 1,000 to 100,000 apples) the brain literally cannot fathom such numbers.